Downriver (15 page)

A knot of local black kids, in the tea interval, picked up the rudiments of boomerang throwing: the blade held upright, spun twisting into the wind. They returned the following evening, to drop an incautious grey squirrel from a plane tree; and to watch while it was chewed – then abandoned – by a yelping levy of over-fed pooches.

My son was restless. Cricket was not his game. It was too far away. And too cold an afternoon. I had seen as much as I needed. Conscious of the sacrilege, we set off for home before the game was concluded. I did not witness the end of Clive Lloyd's brief innings.

VII

In Meath Gardens, off Roman Road, the hands of the clock were edging to attention at midday; a group of fit, dark-skinned young men, in green blazers, stood over a hole in the ground, practising late cuts and cover drives with their rolled umbrellas. A publicity girl from Qantas, who had miscalculated – by one – the number of buttons to leave undone on her starched
blouse, was fending off the attentions of the sole representative of the English Press, a papillous ‘stringer' from the
East London Advertiser
.

Edith Cadiz, in a startling white raincoat, had detached herself from what she was seeing. She leant against a pollarded English elm, and looked across the insistent wave-pattern of the reclaimed graveyard to the allotments. The dull grass was like a coarse hospital blanket too hastily pulled over a corpse that refuses to shut its eyes. Edith tightened her grip on the Eliot. She ‘heard another's voice cry: “What! Are
you
here?” / Although we were not.' If she had painted this scene she would have omitted herself altogether. She reached for her dark glasses: believing, like a child playing hide and seek, that if she could not see, then nobody could see her. She was no longer an actor in anything she was forced to observe. Men, she decided, could never aspire to play any role but the audience. She remembered St Paul: ‘
Their mouths were like open graves
.' She knew that Triscombe would come, but that is not what she was waiting for. The notebooks were all filled: her presence was no longer necessary. She wanted to read them, one by one, to Triscombe; so that he would be fatally infected. The story would stay with him, and – in time – he would die of it. Gentle, westward-drifting rain lacquered her fine red hair to her skull. She was unaware of it. Let this scene finish. Return once more to the Fournier Street refuge; to Roland's basement kitchen. The pine table, the red coffee pot. A cigarette. Make a performance of it, pass the burden.

Triscombe's black Jaguar came through the arched entrance gate, with its weathered heraldic shields, its eroded script,
Victoria Park Cemetery
1845; and drew up, shy of the ceremonial site – engine running, windows steamed over. Two council gardeners rested on their spades, waiting for the signal, and calculating the precise amount of overtime they would earn. They had a small side-bet running on whether the eucalyptus would last a month.

The dog, Gelert, once Triscombe's guardian, lay at Edith's feet, scarcely breathing; his pelt heavy with the rain. He was
faithful to whoever fed him. The dark darkened. Commuter trains hissed and clattered on the elevated railway that marked the boundary of the field. Sparks were struck from the overhead wires. The Victorian headstones had been broken up, carried away, incorporated into municipal building projects. The ground was shaken by its agitated past. It was humped, pocked, pitted: lacking a glossary of the original names. The memorial site elected to remain anonymous, remembering nothing. A seismic disturbance had gashed the earth, so that the dead walked free. They clustered in the feathery trees. And the trees bore it: mutilated into eccentricity, dense with voices, wind-serving. They took on strange ancestral forms. They were cartoons of abdicated tribal power.

Morkul-kua-luan
: only the Spirit of the Long Grass knew King Cole. Rogue eddies whirled from the speed of the railway; seeking animal heat, untwisting the vines and insipid clusters of green that masked the allotment. A recollection of rage surfaced among the Qantas cricketers: the stone of their hearts broke open, and fell from them. They stood with their fathers; they were men. They made a circle around the hole where the tree would be planted.

Triscombe lumbered from the car; a leather-jacketed researcher, up on his toes, to keep a golfing umbrella over the great man's streaky pate. Ever the politician, Triscombe squinted through the rain to identify the weightier journalists, the position of the video cameras and the microphones.
Nothing!
He evidently had all the pulling power of a flatulent concrete poet. He had drawn two gardeners who were scowling at their boots (selfevident members of the electorally unwashed), and a dozen sullen – and disenfranchised – darkies. Was it for this that Triscombe had been sitting for ten minutes in his car, pumping himself to give his blessing to King Cole, for his voyage through the Dreamtime. There was no going back. Why had he bothered? There was no ethnic percentage in Abos. Now that he thought about it, he convinced himself that there weren't any in Hackney.
We had everything else: Blacks, Indians, Pakis, Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Yids, Fascists, Pinkos, Greens, Gays – but hardly an Australian of any type. A few back-packing antipodean dykes got into the schools; but they moved on fast. And good riddance. No, this was all a bad mistake. Or worse, a miscalculation. His firebrand eloquence would have to be spat at the wart-decorated flasher with his notebook – who might turn out to be nothing more than a peculiarly unselective autograph-hound.

Then Triscombe noticed Edith. That eucalyptus hole, he thought, will never be big enough. He whispered something to his researcher.

He plunged – fists flailing, loose strands of hair flicking the faces of his small audience, like a cow's tail chasing flies – straight into the heat of the matter: the slaughter of a whole people, sacred innocents, keepers of the dream, by rapacious and sadistic land thieves, backed by puppet governments and megacorporations. He named names. He spoke of genetic mutations, ancestral sites poisoned for millennia; of enforced sterilization; drink-sadness; deaths in custody. He described back-country cells that looked like abattoirs. He poured out all the well-rehearsed routines his researcher had fed him over a leisurely breakfast of kidneys, burnt bacon, and fried bread that dripped white grease when he pressed it with his fork. And it was all true. But because
he
was saying it that truth was lost. He merely participated in the crimes; and, by naming them – without heart-directed anger – he softened their edges, generalized them to impotent rhetoric. The tree-planting had become a second burial for King Cole, a display.

Now Triscombe was sure. He was aroused by the false demons of his well-crafted performance. He was excited by the extinct emotions he had touched within his hidden self; and he had to disguise the physical manifestation of that excitement by immediately plunging his hands into his trouser pockets. He was
genuinely
moved, both by the tragic stupidity of genocide, the termination of a non-renewable human resource, and by the
solitary courage of Edith Cadiz. He was inspired, but his solution was extreme. He wanted to – as he saw it – arrange a marriage: between the spirit of King Cole and the warm body of his former mistress. He wanted Edith to be buried alive.

He turned away. The gardeners were stamping down the earth, hammering in a stake to support the tender growth: they were shuffling back to their shed. But the woman was the crime. A taboo had been wilfully broken. She had witnessed a moment of ceremonial magic. Punishment was inevitable. Triscombe was not implicated. ‘
The rest is not our business
.'

Edith was smiling: none of this mattered. It was happening to somebody she had known once, and left behind. The researcher tried to cross the park towards her; but time was frozen, the ‘long second' of science fiction – everybody else was moving so slowly through solid air that was turning into ice. He closed his fist around Gelert's collar and hauled him, choking, back to the Jaguar. A track was visible where the animal's weight had resisted, and flattened the wet grass. The engine was over-revving: the car backed up over the flower beds, spinning earth, then jolted out under the arch, and away into the traffic of Roman Road.

Playing its part, the rain began to fall with more purpose. Edith turned up her collar. She seemed to be quite alone, under the tree, on that dismal ground. Even if she had been searching for one, there was no way out: she was trapped, blocked in by the flats and the railway. Then some men, who had been casually watching, talking among themselves, walked out of the pool of shadows beneath the embankment wall, and came quickly towards her.

‘The beetles dying of the plague

don't care what railways are like'

Benjamin Péret,

The Girls' Schools are Too Small

We had hardly begun: we were no more than two or three lunches into the project when I first heard the term ‘kill fee'. The trainee director assigned to vet our suitability let it fall from a peak of feigned excitement and urgency: as if this film was the
one
he had been searching for to launch not only his career, but… ours as well. Together we were a dream-ticket: Ken Loach paired with… Tom Wolfe. We were irresistible. He smiled, and looked from Fredrik's face to mine in the vain hope of approval. I thought his team sounded, well, a little… over the hill. Museum-bait, in fact. Kitchen-table socialism vampirizing a seizure of good-old Southern-style carpetbaggery. And there was a definite limit, now rapidly approaching, to the number of metaphorical pause-bubbles (…) I could swallow, without punching the over-articulate director in the mouth. I was prepared to suffer just so much in the cause of gluttony.

Our boy was clearly a non-combatant. And we were the end of the line. A good way of stiffing him from the payroll. We were a dangerous mess, waiting for some fool to tread in it. There was, sadly, a saturation point to how much flaky carnival footage this man could pump through the schedules on the ‘ethnic guilt' quota, before somebody noticed. It was time to make his play. ‘Kill fee': it hung there, slightly obscene, a dagger of ice suspended over the pink lawn tablecloth; reminding us of exactly who held
the whiphand, and who we were working for. One unjustifiable paragraph, one location more than half a mile from a three-star diner, and we were back on the street, with not much more than our bus fare to show for four months of heroic eating.

The ‘Corporation', as is well known, is a Christian version of the Vatican, with all the immemorial chains of command, schisms, heresies, court favourites, interrogations, excommunications, icons, martyrdoms, and public burnings: thickets of conspiracy in which the left hand denies all knowledge of the pocket the right hand is picking. The Vatican has its global responsibilities (getting the dirt out of banknotes, and promoting moon-tested golf-buggies); but the Corporation yields nothing as a fountainhead of dogma. White papers, touched by the hand of Reith, are eternal and infallible:

(1) There are two sides (and only two) to every argument.

(2) We shall offer them, without fear or favour, equal air-time.

(3) The only good book is a dead book. (And grant, O Lord, that it be set in Africa.)

(4) Yesterday's dross, if repeated often enough, is today's classic. (Memo to
Contracts
: Tighten up on those Repeat Fees.)

(5) It is always better to
employ
Irish Jokes, than to tell them. We are never vulgar. Especially about money.

(6) If the Irish are ‘men of violence' they may speak only in subtitles.

(7) It is a short step from the Department of Religious Affairs to the throne of the Director-General.

(8) Only Accountancy is a Higher Calling. The ‘Accountant' is the person who is accountable to no one (except, of course, She-Whose-Name-May-Not-Be-Taken-In-Vain).

The Corporation, in its perpetual and never satisfied search for ‘The New', operates a nervous compromise between greed and caution: a sinister cloud of anti-matter, giving off odours of sanctity and expensive aftershave, trawls for virgin energies to subvert. Two of the sharpest headhunters, pulling their faces out
of their coffee cups with an audible ‘Eureka!', stumbled,
at the same moment
, on the name of Fredrik Hanbury: who was so prolific in his journalism, so much in demand, he seemed to be reviewing half-digested pastiches of his own work, flashing from magazine to newspaper in an exuberantly Socratic dialogue that only he was fast enough to follow. This banal coincidence in the recognition of a name it was harder to avoid than to notice was elevated – by a species of desperate occultism that lurks in all stagnant bureaucracies – into a significantly compelling
synchronicity
. And so, only a year after his seminal book of essays went out of print, the word from the Bush was – bring me the head of Fredrik Hanbury!

Fredrik had done a number in the
London Review of Books
on a novel I had recently published; which would otherwise, despite the gallantly double-glazed ‘doorstepping' of my publisher, have sunk into necessary and well-deserved obscurity. Fredrik suggested that Spitalfields was, currently, a battleground of some interest; a zone of ‘disappearances', mysteries, conflicts, and ‘baroque realism'. Nominated champions of good and evil were locking horns in a picaresque contest to nail the ultimate definition of ‘the deal'. We had to get it on. There were not going to be any winners. If we didn't move fast, any halfway-sharp surrealist could blunder in and pick up the whole pot.

‘Spitalfields': the
consiglieri
liked the sound of it, the authentic whiff of heritage, drifting like cordite from the razed ghetto. But, please, do not call it ‘Whitechapel', or whisper the dreaded ‘Tower Hamlets'. Spitalfields meant Architecture, the Prince, Development Schemes: it meant gay vicars swishing incense, and charity-ward crusaders finding the peons to refill the poor benches, and submit to total-immersion baptism. It meant Property Sharks, and New Georgians promoting wallpaper catalogues. It meant video cams tracking remorselessly over interior
detail
, and out, over lampholders, finials, doorcases, motifs, cast-iron balconies; fruity post-synch, lashings of Purcell. And bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines. Ball-and-chain demolitions.
Sold!
There's nothing the cutting-room boys like as much as a good ball-and-chain: especially with some hair-gelled noddy in a pin-stripe suit at the controls. Skin-deep Aztec fantasies of glass and steel lifting in a self-reflecting glitter of irony from the ruins. Spitalfields was this week's buzz-word. And Spitalfields meant lunches.